Original subtitles

- NARRATOR: 2nd November, 1989, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

32-year-old Melissa Halstead phones her mother in Ohio.

- MELISSA: I just called to wish you a happy birthday,

have a good time and take care of yourself.

Goodbye, I love you.

- NARRATOR: It was her last call home.

Six months later, her headless torso was found

dumped in a bag in the Westersingel Canal, Rotterdam.

Her hands were also missing.

- STEVE: The fact that he can kill women is one thing.

But then to dismember the bodies and remove body parts

that even to this day have still not been recovered

is just a horrendous and shocking thing to do.

- NARRATOR: Melissa's murderer was her British boyfriend,

33-year-old John Sweeney,

otherwise known as the Scalp Hunter.

After brutally dismembering her, he created macabre pictures

about the killing.

- LOUIS: You look at his artwork

and it speaks for itself

as to the depth of his very grotesque fantasies,

and that tells you what's going on inside of him.

- NARRATOR: In the ten years that followed, back in London,

he brutally dismembered a second woman,

and subjected another to a violent campaign of assault.

- DELIA: I saw my small finger fly through the air,

and then I thought, "That's it, I've had enough, I want to die.

I don't want to live in this pain."

- NARRATOR: Driven by jealousy, he maimed and even held

his so-called lovers prisoner in their own homes.

He hacked two women to death in a moment of rage.

That makes John Sweeney one of the world's most evil killers.

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♪♪

- NARRATOR: When 33-year-old Melissa Halstead's body

was found in Rotterdam's Westersingel Canal

on May the 3rd, 1990,

police at the time were mystified as to the identity

of this unknown woman.

- No one knew who she was.

Obviously, it was a female, but there's no head,

there's no hands, so there's no dental records

to be found, there are no fingerprint records to be found.

Remember, this is a long time before DNA really became

significant in the identification of a body.

- NARRATOR: Former detective inspector Steve Smith

would later investigate the murder

for London's Metropolitan Police.

- Identification was impossible.

What they could say was that it was the body

of a...a young, white female.

In around late 20's, early 30's.

She was trussed up with rope,

but there was really nothing else to go on.

- NARRATOR: Eighteen years later the police finally identify

the body as Melissa's by DNA during a cold case review.

It was then they linked it to a strikingly similar killing

of 31-year-old Paula Fields in December 2000.

She'd also been found savagely dismembered

and dumped in bags in Regents Canal, London, England.

- ELIZABETH: When you dismember somebody,

you are essentially obliterating them,

you are cutting them into pieces,

and that expresses an anger towards the victim,

that they are something that should be destroyed,

that they're not worthy.

- NARRATOR: The chilling common thread found between them?

They both had a relationship with London-based John Sweeney.

For the first time, British and Dutch polices forces

launched a joint European murder inquiry

into the suspected killer.

- STEVE: This was a violent, controlling individual

who in every relationship with women throughout his life,

he had behaved in the same reprehensible way,

just exploding in fits of rage and violence.

Culminating in murder.

- NARRATOR: Those who knew the happy-go-lucky

bohemian carpenter were horrified to discover a man

with a long history of domestic violence against women.

- Sweeney's attacks on women

that he was in relationships with

put him in the category of domestic abuser,

and domestic abuse is not taken as seriously

as it should be.

This really, really frustrates me

about this kind of case,

because there's a failure to see how dangerous

a serial domestic abuser is.

- NARRATOR: This killer's story begins

on the 13th of October, 1956.

John Patrick Sweeney was born in Kirkdale, Liverpool,

in the northwest of England.

He had a brother and a sister.

After spending his early years in Merseyside,

the family moved 14 miles further north,

to Skelmersdale, in Lancashire.

- STEVE: There was some evidence that we discovered

that his father was violent, and John Sweeney did receive

beatings in his youth, and I think this would have

possibly made him resentful of any sort of authority.

- ELIZABETH: He comes from quite a working-class background

so there's this idea that men should be tough,

they should be stoic, they should be resilient,

so the kind of stuff he's being exposed to

during his childhood is kind of teaching him something

about women; who they are, how they should behave,

and that they are inferior to men.

- NARRATOR: Young Sweeney had a creative mind.

He developed a passion for drawing and painting.

At the age of 15, he considered art school,

but instead trained as a carpenter.

- ELIZABETH: He wanted to be an artist,

but he ended up going into carpentry and joinery,

because I think there was that expectation

that the young men--young working-class men--were not

going to pursue those kind of artistic, creative endeavors,

so I think there's always that frustration in him,

that he has to be a particular type of man.

- NARRATOR: As a teenager, the man's man Sweeney

showed a capacity for extreme violence.

This resulted in a number of run-ins with the authorities.

- STEVE: Sweeney had convictions from his teenage years

because he was always showing violent tendencies.

I certainly remember that one of his earlier convictions

was involved in an affray outside a fish-and-chip shop.

He got involved in an altercation

with some other youths,

and I believe there was certainly an axe

that was brandished.

I think it was by luck, really, that no one got seriously hurt.

So he was on the radar of the police

from a young age.

- NARRATOR: By 1974, the wayward Sweeney

appeared to settle down,

marrying at the tender age of just 18.

He and his young wife, Anne, lived in Skelmersdale.

- GEOFFREY: They had two children, a boy and a girl.

It's a very violent relationship.

He beats her. He hits her regularly.

- ELIZABETH: A lot of his violence focuses around

the domestic setting, he's violent towards

the women in his life, and there are criminal incidents

that are connected to that.

- NARRATOR: Sweeney reportedly threw bricks through the window

and abused the family's pet turtles at home.

But it was his wife who suffered the most.

- Sweeney had a proprietary view of the different women

he was involved in in his life.

In other words, he thought he owned the women,

and as a result he was extremely controlling,

he wanted to know everything they were doing,

he wanted to control all of their movements,

and if something is done that's out of his control

or something that he doesn't want, he explodes,

in a very violent way.

- NARRATOR: After just five years of marriage,

Sweeney's wife decided she'd had enough,

and divorced him in 1979.

But the ever-manipulative Sweeney persuaded her

to make a fresh start with him once again.

- STEVE: Amazingly, they remarried.

It was about 1981, but unfortunately,

after a very short period of time,

the second marriage also went sour, again,

entirely due to Sweeney's

unreasonable and violent behavior.

- NARRATOR: The same old sadistic Sweeney

had reappeared once again.

One evening, though, the regular domestic violence

he inflicted on his wife escalated to new heights.

- STEVE: One occasion, she'd had a major operation,

and Sweeney got drunk one night,

and he was so violent towards her when he attacked her,

that he assaulted her and he had actually burst

her operation scar.

- NARRATOR: Enough was enough for Sweeney's wife,

and once again, she ended their relationship.

John Sweeney finally left the family home.

However, one day, his ex-wife, Anne, was with her neighbor,

when she suddenly heard noises from her own house next door.

- STEVE: She chose to call the police.

When an officer turned up and helped search the house,

in her bedroom, Sweeney jumped out of a wardrobe

with an axe and a knife,

stating that he just wanted to surprise her,

so one can only imagine what sort of surprise

that would have been if the police hadn't been present.

- ELIZABETH: He intended to do serious harm to his wife.

I think he actually intended to kill her,

because she'd slipped out of his control

and he wanted that back.

- NARRATOR: He was arrested but later released

without charge, on agreement that he'd stay away

from his wife.

She divorced him once again

and moved 150 miles south with their two children

to Northampton.

Sweeney also decided it was time for a change,

leaving his hometown of Skelmersdale,

where he was under the watchful eye of the police.

- STEVE: He went off the radar for a while,

he went looking for work abroad

because there was more money, more opportunity,

casual work was easy to come by.

So he certainly traveled to Germany,

and probably France and the Netherlands,

but his actual movements are really quite sketchy.

- NARRATOR: But before long, 26-year-old John Sweeney

would be back to his old ways.

- GEOFFREY: What I believe, and absolutely believe,

is he was, in the end, a predator looking for victims,

looking for a woman who was vulnerable,

looking for someone whom he could entice,

someone he could...draw into the spider's web

of his control.

- NARRATOR: Soon, he'd ensnare another victim on his travels,

another unsuspecting woman he could control and abuse.

This time, though,

he'd return to his passion for drawing,

and his gruesome artwork would reveal more sinister plans.

1986. London, England.

30-year-old wife abuser John Sweeney was divorced

and living more than 60 miles away from his family.

Now, he's set his sights on finding another woman

he could entice into his home.

Whilst working as a carpenter on the set of a photoshoot,

he met Melissa Halstead, an American photographer.

- ELIZABETH: She was a model, she was a really stunning

young woman,

and she meets Sweeney,

and you'd think, "What on earth did she see in this guy?"

But actually, when you look at people like John Sweeney,

they are very quick to suck you in

and make you feel very special,

and Melissa was quite vulnerable

'cause she's in a country that she doesn't know,

she hasn't got that strong support network

of friends and family around her,

and she is, in essence, the ideal victim for Sweeney,

because he's able to isolate her.

- NARRATOR: Shortly after they met,

Melissa agreed to set up home with Sweeney in North London.

- ELIZABETH: The initial relationship between

Melissa and Sweeney,

it would've been full of charm and romance,

he would've swept her off her feet,

because that's how abusers operate.

They come in as this knight in shining armor,

they make themselves indispensable to you.

- NARRATOR: Soon, though, the charm melted away,

and John Sweeney, the domestic abuser,

revealed his true self.

- This relationship was quite quick to turn nasty,

and the following year, he was already assaulting her,

and I think by that point, he chipped away so expertly

at her self-esteem and at her confidence,

that she finds herself in this impossible situation.

- NARRATOR: Melissa's family in Ohio, in the United States,

were becoming concerned about this new relationship

that she'd been drawn into.

Her sister paid a visit to London

and didn't like what she discovered.

- STEVE: She took an instant dislike to Sweeney.

Some drugs were found in Sweeney and Melissa's flat,

and this really added to her view that Sweeney

was not a good individual at all for her sister to be with.

In fact, there was one conversation that Melissa had,

in which she confided in her that if anything ever happened

to her, then it would be Sweeney that had done it.

- NARRATOR: And sure enough, within 12 months

of moving in with Melissa,

serial abuser Sweeney came onto the police radar

once again.

In 1987, he was reprimanded twice by the authorities

for violent assaults on his girlfriend.

- One of the assaults involved Sweeney throwing a chair at her.

Causing injury, I think to her legs,

and then on another occasion,

he punched her, causing severe bruising.

- NARRATOR: On both occasions, Sweeney was slapped on the wrist

with a fine, he never received a custodial sentence.

- ELIZABETH: Domestic abuse doesn't have a particularly

high status as a crime,

nowhere near as high as it should be,

so we will often find that men convicted of domestic abuse,

the sentences they receive are quite lenient,

they will get let off, they'll be free to harm

other people.

- NARRATOR: Tragically for Melissa,

the abusive Sweeney would disappear off the police radar

once again.

When her work visa ran out in the summer of 1988,

the couple decided to move to Vienna, in Austria.

- STEVE: Sweeney and Melissa were in Austria together,

and for a time-being, everything would seem fine.

Work was good, they were making a living,

and they were renting a property in the center of Vienna.

- NARRATOR: But the romance of a new city

would soon wear thin.

One night, after a drunken argument,

Sweeney chased Melissa with a hammer,

and hit her over the head.

- A hammer! I mean, not just the fists,

a--a proper blunt instrument.

He attacks her ruthlessly,

and is indeed taken by the police

and thrown into jail.

- NARRATOR: Melissa was rushed to hospital

with a fractured skull,

and this time, Sweeney was jailed for assault.

In prison, he built up a seething resentment

towards his girlfriend for his predicament.

Here, Sweeney the artist began sketching again,

with terrifying results.

- STEVE: Some of the drawings and the pictures

that Sweeney had done were-- apart from very graphic

and very gruesome-- were confessional.

- We are talking about an incredibly warped individual

with an imagination that is so violent,

that is so depraved,

it's very difficult to actually describe.

- NARRATOR: The most alarming sketch he drew

in his prison cell was one he sarcastically dubbed

"A romantic weekend for two in Austria."

It was anything but romantic.

- LOUIS: One of the things psychologists use

when they evaluate somebody is ask them to draw pictures,

because the individual in his drawings,

are projecting what's going on internally into his artwork,

and I think the same could be said with Sweeney.

If you look at what he drew, it's an x-ray of his mind,

it's exactly what he was thinking about.

You see that he was thinking about killing and violence.

- NARRATOR: Melissa, meanwhile, was on the road to recovery,

blissfully unaware of Sweeney's dark drawings.

She took pity on her abuser, and in February 1989,

made an unexpected move.

- Due to the legal system in place in Austria at the time,

it was possible for a victim to petition the judge

and effectively ask for clemency,

which is what Melissa did.

And the judge, on hearing her pleas for mercy,

released him.

- NARRATOR: Sweeney was ordered to leave Vienna,

so the couple hit the road once again,

traveling 700 miles northwest

to Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.

- They rented a flat in the center of Amsterdam,

very close to the central railway station,

where they stayed for the whole of 1989.

- NARRATOR: In November 1989,

Melissa phoned her family in Ohio.

No one was in, and she left a message.

- MELISSA: Hi, Mom, it's Melissa,

I just called to wish you happy birthday.

Have a good time, and take care of yourself.

Goodbye, I love you.

- NARRATOR: It was her last call home.

Six months later, at the end of April 1990,

Sweeney exploded into a rage from which there was no return.

- GEOFFREY: One of his fantasies is dismembering female bodies.

It's horrifying to think of.

In this case, he kills Melissa.

We don't know for sure exactly how.

I suspect with violence of tremendous kind,

but we don't know because he removed her head

and her hands.

He broke her spine in half,

collapsing the body,

and put it into a, effectively, big, black bag.

- NARRATOR: Sweeney then made a sharp exit

from Amsterdam to avoid the finger of suspicion.

He took Melissa's dismembered body with him

nearly 50 miles south, to the Dutch city of Rotterdam.

- STEVE: What we still don't know is how did he transport

Melissa from Amsterdam to Rotterdam,

which is a fair distance.

He was a big lad, Sweeney, I mean, he was strong,

and he could've got a train or a coach.

If he keeps the bag with him, it's possible to do,

so we figured that's probably what he did.

- NARRATOR: Once in Rotterdam, Sweeney made his way

to the Westersingel Canal,

which runs through the heart of the city.

- STEVE: Obviously, when it was quiet, maybe

under the cover of darkness-- he chose his moment just...

slipped his bag into the canal, quite easy to do.

- GEOFFREY: She's simply dropped into a canal

and left.

I think it is a despicable crime.

Not just the matter of the murder,

nor indeed just the matter of the dismemberment,

but it's the denial of itself, the denial of the individual,

the desecration of life

that makes it so poisonous and so evil.

- NARRATOR: Soon, though, the depths

of the Westersingel Canal gave up its dark secret.

On May the 3rd, the bag containing Melissa's torso

was spotted by a passerby and reported to the police.

They opened it, making the gruesome discovery.

The authorities were perplexed. Who was this young woman?

- She was missing the key body parts that you need

for identification, so--there was no head,

so dental records couldn't be used,

her hands were missing so fingerprints couldn't be taken.

- STEVE: There was a formal police investigation,

and extensive inquiries were obviously made

into the possible identification of the victim,

but unfortunately, all came to nothing.

- NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Melissa's family were concerned

as the phone calls home had stopped.

They hadn't spoken to her for more than a year.

It was completely out of character.

- STEVE: They did make inquiries with the Amsterdam police,

but they really couldn't provide much information.

They didn't know where Melissa had been staying,

they certainly didn't know where Sweeney was.

So really, from the Halstead family's perspective,

it was a very worrying but a very frustrating time for them.

- NARRATOR: Melissa's family reported her missing

in Amsterdam,

but Rotterdam came under a different police district.

This meant that the authorities didn't link her disappearance

with the inquiry into the headless torso.

- After a fairly short space of time,

the investigation was closed

and the body was interred in a public cemetery

in Rotterdam, and that's where it remained.

- NARRATOR: Before long, the dangerously free spirit,

Sweeney, was on the road once again.

He'd got away with murder,

and soon the killer and domestic abuser

was looking for his next victim.

Camden, northwest London, 1991.

34-year-old John Sweeney met 40-year-old nurse

Delia Balmer in their local pub.

- DELIA: He asked me if I'd like a beer,

and he told me he'd traveled back and forth to Germany

to find work and because I love traveling and...

I thought, "Oh, he's a traveler,

he's the kind of guy I would like."

- NARRATOR: After their first encounter, weeks later,

Delia bumped into Sweeney once again, on the street.

- DELIA: He asked me out, and I says, "Oh, no, I'm too busy,"

and then I felt terrible, because I'm silly and stupid,

and...I thought, "Oh, he might think I'm awful and thing,"

and I wrote him a letter in the end, I gave it to him

and started something I should not have started.

- NARRATOR: Before she knew it, the killer Sweeney

had swept Delia off her feet and they were dating.

He laid on the charm, fixing her broken window.

- I had nobody to help me with anything ever,

and I thought, "Oh, he's doing this for me,"

and, uh, then he started bringing flowers and chocolates

and then in the end, he ended up moving in with me.

- NARRATOR: Sweeney put his carpentry skills to good use,

making stools, tables, shelving, and even a bed

that Delia couldn't afford to buy herself.

- ELIZABETH: You've got the classic pattern of behavior

with a coercively controlling abuser here.

He's this knight in shining armor character,

he makes himself indispensable to her,

and it doesn't take long, though, for that veneer to crack

and for the real Sweeney to shine through.

- DELIA: He made new kitchen cupboards,

and the next day he came along

and deliberately scratched the top,

I says, "What did you do that for?"

I said, "They were nice, and look, why do you do that?"

"Oh, it's nothing."

So, little things, they mounted up, mounted up,

and then it got worse, and, uh...

I wanted to get rid of him, but I was afraid to ask.

And I thought, "What am I gonna do?

I want him out of here."

- NARRATOR: After more than two years of threatening behavior,

in December 1993,

Delia finally built up the confidence to ask Sweeney

to leave.

He agreed but kept on putting it off.

In the meantime, his controlling behavior continued.

- I couldn't go anywhere, he'd always go with me.

We'd go to the pub together, we did everything together.

I knew I was in trouble,

and I didn't know how to get out of it.

- It gives you s good insight

into Sweeney's behavior with women.

Once you got into his orbit,

he was totally controlling of you,

he just wanted to dominate every aspect of you

and terrorize you, and this gave

a great deal of erotic gratification to Sweeney,

this was arousing to him, to terrify somebody

and to have them totally under your control and dominance.

- NARRATOR: In early May, 1994,

Delia managed to escape his clutches

and went out with a friend for the day.

When she returned, though,

Sweeney flew into a jealous rage,

tying Delia to their bed and threatening her

with a gun and a knife.

- DELIA: "If you scream, I'll cut your tongue out,"

I think he said.

I was lying there, tied up, and he said,

"And I suppose you wonder what happened

to my American girlfriend, Melissa?"

And I thought, "Well, why does he ask me this now?"

And he said, "We had a room in Amsterdam, I went in,

"there was two Germans there with her, I killed them all.

"I didn't know what to do with the bodies,

"I sat with them for three days,

"on the third day I cut them up, and I put them in bags

and I threw them in the canal."

- NARRATOR: Delia now knew the terrifying truth.

She'd been living with a killer.

And now he had her as his hostage.

- I knew there was no way of trying to get away.

I knew--it was as if he could read my mind.

I didn't dare think of doing anything,

and I knew better not to,

because he was very quick and if I tried anything,

I'd probably have ended up cut up or whatever.

- LOUIS: I think it's terrorizing.

He's basically saying, "If you don't listen

"to absolutely everything I say, I'm gonna kill you

like I killed the other person," and it's just terrifying.

What Sweeney did with the women is,

he wanted to break their mind,

so that he could control absolutely everything,

their emotion, their behavior, everything.

- NARRATOR: After a week being held hostage,

Delia was finally released to go back to work.

- STEVE: Throughout the summer of 1994, Delia and Sweeney

did stay together in the same flat, her flat.

But Sweeney was playing games.

He continually told her that he was going to leave,

and then he would leave, he'd come back,

and this went on for months.

- NARRATOR: In July, Delia sought help

from a woman's refuge.

The police escorted her home to her flat

while Sweeney was out.

She told them about his macabre drawings

and his confession to Melissa's murder.

- DELIA: I said, "Look, he was in Amsterdam

"with his girlfriend and he cut up his girlfriend

and the two Germans."

They said, "Oh, come on, now, he's just trying to scare you."

And I thought, "Oh, yeah, sure,

just what I thought you would say."

Well, they didn't take that,

and then they didn't look at the drawings.

- NARRATOR: Sweeney finally moved out

at the beginning of November,

so Delia seized her chance and changed her locks.

Sweeney was enraged when he discovered this.

On Friday, the 11th of November, he broke in and launched

a surprise attack by ramming his fingers down her throat.

- DELIA: The pain was excruciating.

Then, he took his fingers out, he held his fingers up,

he says, "You bit me!"

His fingers were covered in blood.

And I opened my mouth and large clots of blood,

about the size of a tablespoon,

spilled out of my mouth onto the floor.

I said, "It's not your blood, you've damaged me inside."

And then he dragged me up and took me to the front room.

- NARRATOR: The next day, Delia managed to escape

to a police station, but when she was escorted home,

Sweeney was nowhere to be seen.

The following day, the determined abuser

attacked her as she left home,

and forced her back into her flat.

When Delia missed an appointment to meet a friend,

the police were alerted and officers called

at Delia's door.

- DELIA: I went to the door, he followed behind,

and just out of my mouth, there was the policeman there,

the police female there, I said, "Help me!"

and I rushed out of the door and down the street.

- ELIZABETH: What we see in the second attack

is an escalation in the level of violence that Sweeney

is prepared to use to take back control.

Um, Delia nearly had her tongue ripped out,

and I think he possibly would have killed her

in this second attack,

had her friend not called the police

and they turned up at the property.

- NARRATOR: When police search Delia's flat,

behind her bath panel, they found a mysterious bag.

In it were tools showing Sweeney's murderous intentions.

- Inside the holdall was a tarpaulin, masking tape,

uh, surgical gloves, and masks,

and also lengths of rope.

And I would describe the holdall and its contents

as a killer's kit bag.

But unfortunately, they didn't realize

the significance of what these items could really be.

- NARRATOR: Sweeney was arrested and held on remand

in Pentonville Prison for a week.

He was released on condition that he'd return

to his parents' home in Skelmersdale,

in the north of England, 200 miles away from Delia.

But on the 22nd of December,

he broke his bail conditions when he once again

started staking out her London home.

- This one night, there was no one on the street,

it was the darkest day of the year...

- NARRATOR: As usual, Delia propped open her front door

with a brick, then went back down her steps

to pick up her bike.

- I was halfway up the stairs with the bicycle.

I kept looking from side to side,

wondering if he was hiding.

Then I looked right, and there his face was.

I quickly kicked the brick and let the door shut.

I thought, "I've got to face him out here,

"if he gets inside there with me,

he's gonna cut me to bits."

- NARRATOR: Sweeney pulled out and axe and swung it

at Delia's arms.

The killer then reached for a knife.

- DELIA: He cut his palm,

and he says, "You fucking bitch!"

Then he stabbed me through the breast into the lung.

Then he stabbed me in the thigh.

Then he swung the axe, and he took my finger

and he...got the knuckles of the other two,

and I saw my finger fly through the air, to next door.

- NARRATOR: Delia threw her bike on top of herself

to protect her from the blows.

The noise of the axe crashing down on the bike

brought a neighbor outside.

He beats Sweeney with a baseball bat

and the killer fled into the night.

- She has the forethought to kick the brick away

so that the door to her flat slams shut.

Had she not done that, she would almost certainly

have lost her life.

- NARRATOR: Delia was rushed to hospital,

she had two broken arms, two stab wounds

in the thigh and chest, a severed little finger,

and a punctured lung.

She was given 19 units of blood as surgeons fought

to save her life.

Psychologically, though, Delia felt defeated.

- DELIA: I wasn't fighting for my life,

I didn't want to live,

the medical lot were fighting for my life, I wanted to die.

I didn't care anymore, I wanted to be dead.

- NARRATOR: Before the police could find him,

Sweeney went on the run.

Fleeing 65 miles north, to Northampton,

then on to his hometown of Skelmersdale, then he vanished.

- STEVE: After the attack on Delia,

he really goes off the radar.

He manages somehow to get out of the UK and he goes on the run

effectively for six years.

- NARRATOR: Sweeney had the gall to write to police

whilst on the run, sarcastically claiming

Delia's attack was an "axeident."

Soon, he'd return to his disturbing drawings,

portraying revenge on the women who'd scorned him.

London, England, the year 2000.

After six years on the run, 44-year-old John Sweeney

slid back into the UK capital under a new identity.

- ELIZABETH: Sweeney has quite a lot of aliases,

names that he's known by, he's not just John Sweeney,

he's Joe Scouse--Scouse Joe, and, you know,

a whole list of, uh, other names.

- GEOFFREY: Michael this, Joe Johnson,

that was one of Sweeney's other great tricks.

He could hide in plain sight.

He was so--was quite adept at looking rather different.

If you look at photographs of Sweeney,

he can adopt different guises,

he is quite skillful at disguise.

- ELIZABETH: So I think this adds

to his comedian-like quality,

and it allows him to present different versions of himself

to different people.

- NARRATOR: Sweeney roamed building site to building site,

finding easy work as a carpenter in a booming capital.

Here, he met fellow Liverpudlian,

31-year-old Paula Fields.

She'd led a happy life in the northwest,

until she was drawn into London's darker side

of drugs and prostitution.

- ELIZABETH: So Paula was quite a vulnerable individual,

she'd moved from Liverpool to London,

she had some drug dependency issues,

and Sweeney, being the predator that he is,

would've honed in on that very, very quickly.

He would've identified the fact they both came from Liverpool,

so there was that affinity there.

- LOUIS: Unlike Delia, Paula was, uh,

involved in prostitution and she was somewhat

of a street person, so you would think somebody like Paula

would have some street smarts where she would be able

to detect somebody like Sweeney trying to get over on her.

It tells you how crafty and how cunning

and how manipulative Sweeney was.

- NARRATOR: Like other women in his life,

Sweeney, also known as Scouse Joe,

built up a seething resentment towards her.

- She would buy drugs from a local dealer,

and without having the funds,

she would tell the dealer that Joe Scouse would pay,

so the next thing that would happen would be the dealer

would be banging on Joe Scouse's window

asking for payment.

And this would've upset him greatly, I suspect.

- NARRATOR: Sweeney also accused Paula of stealing

his mobile phone.

His resentment continued to build,

and one day in December, it flew out of control.

He violently attacked Paula and ended up killing her.

- GEOFFREY: Yet again, those same fantasies

come to the surface,

those fantasies of dismemberment,

and this time he, again, cuts Paula's head off.

He also takes off her hands, and this time, also her feet.

The remains of her...is cut up into separate parts

and placed in holdalls.

- NARRATOR: Once again, Sweeney disposed of his victim

in a waterway, the region's canal

in North West London.

Two months later, on the 19th of February, 2001,

a bag containing Paula's body parts was found

by boys who were fishing.

The police were called, and five more gruesome holdalls

were recovered.

Then, a full-blown murder inquiry began.

- Within a very short period of time,

they--they got a match with the DNA from...

a woman called Paula Fields from Liverpool.

They very quickly established that she'd had a relationship

with this tall Liverpudlian man who they called Joe Scouse

or Scouse Joe.

- NARRATOR: Before long, police inquiries link

Scouse Joe to John Patrick Sweeney,

and he soon became Britain's most wanted man.

Just a month later, police surveillance

found Sweeney working at a building site off Fleet Street.

The net was finally closing in.

- STEVE: So they then get an armed surveillance team

from Central London to tail Sweeney,

and of course, they jump on him,

just as he's entering the building site,

and that's how he gets nicked.

- GEOFFREY: When the police finally confront Sweeney,

he is armed, he has a gun,

and he has a knife in his waistband,

but finally, finally,

this evil man is brought to justice.

- NARRATOR: After his arrest, police seized over 300 pieces

of his sinister artwork and poems at his property.

- STEVE: In his room, they find drawings and sketches,

a lot of them showing very macabre subjects

like dismembered bodies,

and pictures of him with an axe in his belt, etc.

Also is found two loaded shotguns,

and there's also a garrote.

- NARRATOR: One drawing police found was

menacingly entitled, "The Scalp Hunter."

- GEOFFREY: It's clear what it's supposed to portray,

it's actually him, uh, with an axe in his waistband,

and hanging from his waistband is a blonde scalp,

which is clearly meant to be Delia.

And of course, on the picture is a credit

to Delia, if I can call it that, by Sweeney,

where he says to her, "May you die in pain."

And I think that, to me, sums up the contempt

he had for Delia.

- NARRATOR: After six years of hunting for Delia's attacker,

the police charge 44-year-old John Sweeney

with her attempted murder, false imprisonment,

and firearms offenses.

On March the 5th, 2002, at the Old Bailey,

he received four life sentences.

Despite his punishment, the reality was

that Sweeney could be out on parole

in as little as nine years.

Police needed to prove he was responsible

for Paula Fields' murder to prevent him from getting out.

- STEVE: The investigation into the death of Paula

carried on for some considerable time,

but unfortunately, due... effectively to a lack

of evidence, the inquiry really fizzled out

and no one was ever charged at that stage for Paula's killing.

- NARRATOR: Investigators had hit a brick wall,

but six years later, in 2008,

detective inspector Steve Smith had a call out of the blue

from a Dutch policeman about an unidentified body

they'd found in Rotterdam's Westersingel Canal in 1990.

- STEVE: What he had to tell me was quite amazing.

They'd managed to recover a phial of blood

that was taken from the post mortem examination

of the dismembered female,

but with the advancement in DNA,

they had managed to obtain a full profile of the victim.

The DNA match was that of Melissa Halstead.

- NARRATOR: With this new breakthrough and Sweeney's

earlier confession to Delia about Melissa's killing,

Steve Smith and his Metropolitan Police team formed

the first ever joint European murder inquiry,

sanctioned by Europol.

Sweeney was their prime suspect.

- STEVE: Here we had Sweeney that was involved

in relationships with both Melissa and Paula.

And both women had ended up as dismembered,

body parts had been removed, and both put into canals.

I mean, that for us was way beyond any coincidence,

so he had to be the man responsible.

- NARRATOR: As Melissa's murder had taken place

nearly 20 years earlier, detectives would struggle

for any forensic evidence linking Sweeney to her killing,

but scientific analysis of one of his sketches

would help prove his guilt.

- STEVE: One particular drawing, "One Man Band,"

what was of particular interest to us was

some correction fluid in the middle of the picture,

which, when the scientists looked beneath the fluid

using particular light techniques,

you could see that it was an RIP message

to Melissa Halstead.

How would he have known that she was dead?

Only the killer would know, so to write "RIP" was, to us,

quite telling.

- ELIZABETH: He's so arrogant that he thinks that just

correcting over it, it is going to destroy

any evidence linking it to Melissa's death,

but he's not going to let go of this piece of artwork,

because it gives him power and that sense of control

that he so wants.

- NARRATOR: As police delve deeper into Sweeney's sketches,

they found two drawings they also believed

were clearly confessional.

- STEVE: One is of a female body where the head

and hands are removed, in the fetal position,

which of course resembled how Melissa was found

within the bag.

And then the other one was of interest to us,

was a dismembered female form cut into sections,

which is exactly, really, how Paula was found

in the different bags.

- NARRATOR: But a poem he'd scrawled on the back

of a lottery card was the golden nugget that sealed the deal.

- STEVE: The poem read, "Poor old Melissa,

"chopped her up in bits, food to feed the fish,

Amsterdam was the pits."

Now, that to me, tells you everything you need to know

about what he'd done to Melissa,

and again, that's really confessional.

- NARRATOR: Senior investigating officer Steve Smith

was confident they'd now built their case against Sweeney.

- STEVE: We did struggle, really, with a complete lack

of hard forensic evidence.

We had what we described as similar fact evidence.

So you had the relationships with both women,

and these series of drawings that were confessional,

and a real nugget that we had that Sweeney was really

gonna struggle with, was his confession to Delia

in 1994 about killing Melissa.

- NARRATOR: Nearly 21 years after Melissa's death

and more than ten years after Paula's,

the case was finally heard against John Sweeney

at the Old Bailey in London.

On April the 4th, 2011, the 54-year-old killer

was found guilty on two counts of murder

and perverting the course of justice.

- It's incredibly significant for me that Sweeney received

a whole life order.

He will never be released from prison.

This is reserved for the crimes that cause the most harm,

for the offenders least likely to be rehabilitated.

- GEOFFREY: The most famous photograph of Sweeney,

the one that's used almost everywhere,

there was just the faintest hint of a smirk.

That smirk conceals the serial killer's delight

in knowing something that nobody else does,

and the delight in not allowing the family of the victims

complete closure.

It is utterly, utterly depraved.

- NARRATOR: Although he's never been charged

for any other murders,

police believe Sweeney's sinister artworks

could contain clues to even more killings.

- STEVE Contained within Sweeney's artwork

were some pictures of other women,

in particular two women which we've never actually

managed to trace.

It's quite possible that there may be other victims.

- ♪

- NARRATOR: He was possessive and controlling,

a serial domestic abuser who thought nothing

of torturing his partners and holding them hostage.

The women who escaped did so through a sheer determination

to survive.

He brutally murdered two lovers,

and removed their heads and hands in the hope

they would never be identified.

That makes John Sweeney one of the world's most evil killers.

- ♪

♪♪

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